Laila Lalami

Harper Lee, the reclusive author of To Kill A Mockingbird, is profiled in depth in today’s Chicago Tribune. The site requires registration, but the article is worth a read. An excerpt:

And so in 1949, a 23-year-old Lee moved into a cold-water flat in Manhattan, where her friend Capote already had set up shop as a promising young novelist. She took a job as an airlines clerk and wrote in her off hours.
She was able to quit the airlines job and start writing full time after a turn of events worthy of an O. Henry short story. A married couple, her best friends in New York, had hatched a plan. One Christmas in the late 1950s, Harper Lee was at their home, and she found an envelope addressed to her on the tree. Inside was the promise of a substantial sum of money delivered with a simple message: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” Lee recounted that turning point, “a full, fair chance for a new life,” as she called it, in the December 1961 edition of McCall’s magazine.
“I went to the window, stunned by the day’s miracle,” Lee wrote. “Our faith in you was really all I had heard them say. I would do my best not to fail them.”
Lee insisted on making the gift a loan, which she later repaid.
Her initial efforts were short stories. Then, at the suggestion of her literary agent, Maurice Crane, she expanded one of them into what would become “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

And the rest, as they say, is history. Here’s the article in full: A Life Apart.
Link via MobyLives.

When the Towers Fell, a poem by Galway Kinnell.

I’ve been meaning to give Moorishgirl.com a new look for its one-year anniversary. I also want to switch to Movable Type (I’m getting tired of Blogger) but I get so lazy about things like this. What I don’t understand is that sometimes I’ll even start the process and then give up and decide I’ll just do it later when I have more time, which of course doesn’t make sense, because if I just sat down and did it once all the way through it wouldn’t take long at all. Why oh why do I procrastinate like this?

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002 is already out and so is Best American Short Stories. I need to swing by the bookstore.

Moroccan athlete and UNICEF goodwill ambassador Nawal El-Moutawakil just filmed a PSA produced by the Entertainment Industry Foundation, and due to be shown in several countries around the world. In 1984, she became the first Moroccan, Arab, African and Muslim woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics.
Moroccan runner Said Aouita won the gold that same year, but her win happened a day or two before his, thus eclipsing it. It was a big deal at the time, and now it happens frequently, but she’s a huge star in Morocco, so this is pretty cool.

I enjoyed Ann Patchett’s article about the art of procrastination and other preoccupations of the writer’s life. I particularly liked her description of the transformation of ideas into words:

The novel in my imagination travels with me like a small lavender moth making loopy circles around my head. It is a truly gorgeous thing, its unpredictable flight patterns, the amethyst light on its wings. I think of my characters as I wander through the grocery store. I write out their names like a teenage girl dreaming of marriage. In these early pre-text days my story has more promise, more beauty, than I have ever seen in any novel ever written, because, sadly, this novel is not written. Then the time comes when I have to begin to translate ideas into words, a process akin to reaching into the air, grabbing my little friend (crushing its wings slightly in my thick hand), holding it down on a cork board and running it though with a pin. It is there that the lovely thing in my head dies.

Here’s a link to the article: Why Not Put Off Till Tomorrow the Novel You Could Begin Today?

Salman Rushdie weighs in on US foreign policy:

On Sept. 5 and 6 the State Department will host a high-powered conference on anti-Americanism, an unusual step indicating the depth of American concern about this increasingly globalized phenomenon. Anti-Americanism can be mere shallow name-calling. A recent article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper described Americans as having “a bug up their collective arse the size of Manhattan” and suggested that ” ‘American’ is a type of personality which is intense, humourless, partial to psychobabble and utterly convinced of its own importance.” (…) However, during the past year the Bush administration has made a string of foreign policy miscalculations, and the State Department conference must acknowledge this. After the brief flirtation with consensus-building during the Afghan operation, the United States’ brazen return to unilateralism has angered even its natural allies.

Double Standards Make Enemies

Americans, we are told, support an attack on Iraq. A Newsweek poll says 62% favor military action, a Los Angeles Times poll says 59%, while Time says 51%.

But maybe the disparities highlight hesitations on the part of the public because military action would probably mean thousands of civilian deaths, a greater risk of isolated terrorist retaliations, as well as some military personel casualties on our side as well. And for what? The Bush Administration’s record in capturing “evil-doers” is not stellar. Osama Bin Laden and his chief lieutenant are still at large, so even with strikes, what are the guarantees they’ll get the tyrant?